Yeah, it was covering operating costs and some profit, and would feasibly grow into a decent overall business. But even if it became a decent overall business

Yeah, it was covering operating costs and some profit, and would feasibly grow into a decent overall business. But even if it became a decent overall business ($100-200k/mo profit in 2014?), one pen trap incident on one customer would have had vastly higher costs -- civil or criminal contempt being the most likely outcome (maybe not -$inf, but at least -$millions). If we were the legally best VPN option, I would probably have pushed to keep it going anyway and just shut down when/if that happened, but as it is, non-us providers run by non-US people (there are several good ones) are an objectively better option, so in good conscience there's no reason to continue running a US privacy VPN service without technical controls to prevent being compelled to screw over a user.